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Notes -
Honor based systems are still based on incentives. Sometimes unconsciously via cultural evolution, but it's not like "honor" just get defined randomly. A family backing down and losing honor is essentially signalling "you can kill us without consequence". Maintaining honor, either by getting paid or by getting revenge, signals "if you kill us it won't be worth it." It creates incentives in others not to kill you and your people because the costs to them will outweigh the benefits.
At that point it's all incentives and the term becomes meaningless in describing peoples motives. Since by the same token you can say that an honor system incentivizes revenge killings or that a modern Scandinavian system incentivizes crime by being too lax with punishments whilst also doing the opposite. It collapses reality into a system based thinking that makes no sense and has no predictive power since it takes no account of what people are thinking or doing on their own terms.
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